infrastructure

Recent pandemic-imposed restrictions on face-to-face exchanges have required that we find new ways to connect, often through networked platforms. Without classrooms, labs, and conference environments, ELO has embraced platforms such as Discord and Zoom for communication, and has also looked to online platforms for collaborative writing.

As we contemplate how platforms can keep us connected with our work and with each other, as well as the ways they may limit our interactions and thus arguably “disconnect” us, this panel explores what happens when e-literature—as research, practice, and field—is bound to platforms. E-literature scholarship and creative works that do not have the opportunity for in-person exchange provoke re-examinations of platform affordances and limitations. We ask: how may platforms may shape e-literature through their pre-set parameters, interfaces, and infrastructures? What are the promises and perils of platform-specific e-literature? Can we bring attention to platform through works of e-literature? Led by Marjorie C. Luesebrink, five speakers will answer these questions.

Lai-Tze Fan will trace the platform of a work of e-literature to its infrastructural origins. Nick Montfort’s generative poem Round (2013) is accompanied by a Note that describes the computational processes behind the poem. Fan will trace the specific hardware components’ production, manufacturing, assembly, and natural resource origins that support Round; in so doing, she provides an ecological understanding of the physical platforms that support e-literature.

Will Luers will sketch out some principles for a theory of recombinant fiction by exploring algorithmic flux (scripted variability) as something experiential within the digital text itself. His question for authors and readers of platform-based fiction production is: why is this play of forces between chaos and order thematically and formally important? Luers argues that algorithmic flux in digital fiction has a history, but that it presently lacks a theory and poetics for contemporary practice.

Erik Loyer will examine Google Sheets for how it enables users to treat spreadsheets as databases which can drive whole applications, effectively turning documents into platforms. He asks: what happens when we apply the same approach to digital narrative, giving individual stories the potential to function as their own platforms? Drawing on his experience developing creative tools for the digital humanities, digital comics, and e-lit, Loyer will sketch out some of the potentials and pitfalls of this mode of creation, and how our practices might better encourage it.

Christy Sanford reflects upon the processes for combining images and texts in some of her creative works. Sanford finds herself prompted by various platforms and platform-based texts around her, noting that in order to combine images and text, she needs technology’s assistance and inspiration to let unique characteristics of programs and platforms contribute to the development of her work.

Finally, Caitlin Fisher will discuss the promises and perils of disconnection and connection inside VR platforms that support literary and artistic co-creation. As we consider the use of virtual environments and spaces in place of in-person meetings and engagements, Fisher explores the futures of these platforms as a novel means of creative exchange.

The contemporary digital environment is made possible through a matrix of behemoth infrastructures that traverse the orbital, atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial domains. These infrastructures manifest not only in the narrowly technical sense, but encompass the manufacturing chains, regulatory interfaces, and geopolitical contexts that enable (or forestall) the development, deployment, and maintenance of digital systems at a global scale.

Underpinning all these aspects are the flows of energy and materials constituting the liveable Earthly ecology. The latter comprises the ultimate baseline ‘platform’ on which specific digital platforms, as more commonly expressed, are enabled—but which, being so defined, can obscure these far larger structures and processes in which they are embedded.

Coming out of all this, we can note that the global scale of digital infrastructure is now foundational to the charting and modelling of a rapidly deteriorating planetary ecology, but this comes with the recognition that the former is both the product, and a critical facilitator, of economic processes that are driving the very pollution, wastage, and largely unhindered exploitation behind our present environmental calamities.

It is in these contexts that we are encouraged to evaluate how works of digital art and electronic literature are responding to this uncomfortable paradox. We might recall here how early digital art sought to demonstrate (with admittedly varying success) different possibilities for computing beyond militarised technoscience, and the creative and critical challenge today is to rework and reframe digital platforms so they might perform and inspire substantive ecological critique and expression, rather than be relegated only as perpetuators of extractive, accelerationist, technocentric paradigms. Contemporary electronic literature, in its very particular fusions of data, writing, and the algorithmic, affords rich experimental pathways for just this kind of work—as deftly illustrated by the recent outputs of artists such as J.R. Carpenter and Eugenio Tisselli.

This paper will contextualise and document the author’s latest experiments with creating electronic literary works that bring together a diverse, unconventional assemblage of platforms as a key aspect of their creation and expression. Cameras, satellites, drones, canvas graphics, esoteric code, and printed outputs are combined to establish elaborate, contingent exchanges, with the ‘work’ itself being enacted across these different platforms—each contributing to an always provisional outcome—and drawing its creative and critical force as much by examining and reflecting on these aspects and processes, as the varied marks they leave behind. In particular, the author will discuss his newly emerging work, “Landform”, in which satellite and drone image data of terrestrial landscapes are parsed into esoteric visual algorithms, that, once interpreted, are compiled into code poems that draw on a vocabulary derived from scientific, scholarly, and poetic texts discussing present ecological concerns. The aim is to actualise a set of speculative, experimental relations between the platforms, materials, and concepts involved, investigating their potential for enacting novel modes of environmental computational practice, and, thus, suggest another vector for articulating the entanglements and contingencies that are driving the present situation.

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. Looking at the combination of practices and methodologies that come about through e-lit’s production, study, and dissemination, these articles explore the disruptive potential of electronic literature to decenter and complement the DH field. Creativity is central and found at all levels and spheres of e-lit, but as the articles in this gathering show, there is a need to redeploy creative practice critically to address the increasing instrumentalization of the digital humanities and to turn the digital humanities towards the digital cultures of the present.

Conceived as an ongoing conversation, rolling out 2-3 articles each month until the end of the year, all contributions are tackling at least one of the four following areas: Building Research Infrastructures and Environments, Exploring Creative Research Practice, Proposing Critical Reading Methodologies, and Applying Digital Pedagogy.

(Source: editors)

"Geographers have been at the forefront of interrogating the changes made possible by the ubiquity of computing and the phenomenon of ‘big data’ in an emerging field known as ‘critical data studies’. In this article, I argue that engagement with the proliferation of computing infrastructures that make these new developments possible in the first place allows critical data studies to gain important historical-geographical perspective, connect to new manifestations of uneven development, and better grasp the role of non-human actors within emerging socio-technical relations. This expanded empirical framing opens up new theoretical implications and opportunities for public engagement with critical infrastructure."

Periods of rapid technological change also redraw our sense of cultural and geographical periphery. Routes of transport and travel, communications infrastructures, and networks of cultural production extend, transform, and redirect the perimeters of our personal and collective imagination. In this lecture I will examine how Ireland’s location at the geographical margin of Europe has also rendered it a focal point of technological experimentation and exchange, and has closely entwined it with the story of electronic literature. I propose that the peripheral imagination informing this relationship can also encourage the kind of cultural dissent needed to tackle the consequences of unchecked technological ambition to the fragile environments of the Anthropocene.

This talk will link a discussion of the interface to the representation of fictional entrances in narratives. In the effort to keep it within the time limit, it is build around three images of the entrance: the moment in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad when the fantastical, titular train first appears in the novel, Alexander Galloway’s treatment of our interface on the fictional world of Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait, and the opening few “rooms” of the 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure, a classical electronic narrative that pioneered the text-based interface on the textual world that defined interactive fiction.

The goal of this talk will be to investigate the concept of the interface as a term that can travel between the design of the artifact (digital, written, or visual text) and the world represented. Galloway provides an account of the politics of the interface, and I will explore how that account explains these three very different texts.

In Fall 2014 I taught a “special” version of my “Writing Electronic Literature” course. Throughout this class my students received an overview of established and emerging forms of Electronic Literature including hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive works, and digital poetry. Students read, analyzed, and composed a variety of emerging genres of Electronic Literature. Yet what was unique to this particular iteration of my E-Lit class was that my students contributed to a transmodal generative novel to be published in late 2015 by the academic journal Hybrid Pedagogy. The idea of a generative novel is one that can be traced to the OuliPo group (Ouvroir delittérature potentielle) in France. According to the OuliPo website, the generative writer is “un rat qui construit lui-même le labyrinthe dont il se propose de sortir” (trans. “a rat who builds the maze he wishes to escape”). In this understanding of art and literature, the idea of creation, especially literary creation, is one of wordplay and gameplay. Therefore, the generative novel is, in itself, a game – one of interplay between people, cultures, and institutions. It is an open-ended enterprise that in many ways ensures new and unexpected results. In order to create a work of generative literature, there must be a creative constraint (limitation), which forces the writer to direct writing toward a particular purpose.

The Generative Literature Project is a crowdsourced gamefied digital novel about a murder. Nine writing professors and their students – from the US, The Marshall Islands, and Puerto Rico – completed a series of digitized artifacts about nine “distinguished alumni” of the fictional “Theopolis College”, a highly competitive Liberal Arts College that exists in the leafy suburb of the fictional town of Theopolis. In the artifacts created by my students can be found the clues and red-herrings, motives and alibis of the suspects in the murder of the Theopolis College president.

This paper/presentation will highlight our experimentation with this crowdsourced project as I consider some of the pedagogic affordances of digital writing within a networked and computational environment. As my students developed their fictional work for The Generative Literature Project, I watched how their evolving new sense of reading and writing (in a 21st century digitized context) shaped their own discovery of new ways to learn. What role might Electronic Literature play in transforming pedagogic practices for both reading and writing? In what ways does a networked learning context transform reading and writing methodology?

My discussion will highlight the work of my class’s contribution, offering a birds-eye view of the open ended electronic literary experiment. My presentation will include a further description of the project, including phases of development and forms of collaboration (i.e. the mechanics) and a schema of the digital writing spaces generated thus far (i.e. the infrastructure). Analysis of the project will include reflection on the element of creative play as an inherent entry point in the generative literature undertaking. It will also account for the ways in which community develops around a collaborative fictional enterprise. Other topics addressed include networked character development, social media as a space of fictional creation, pedagogical approaches & challenges, and examples of student generated character “artifacts”.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

A presentation of the CELL consortium's work with interoperability between databases about electronic literature.